Intel
The Facts of Life
Nine things you didn't know you needed to know about the world, sourced (as always) from the pages of books that were happy to tell you.
If you've always felt that there was something vaguely suspicious about a flamingo, you were not wrong. The bird's distinctive pink colouring is entirely dietary: it is produced by carotenoid pigments absorbed from the algae and crustaceans it filters from shallow water. A flamingo raised on a white-bread diet would be white. This is either a profound metaphor about identity or a reason to be more careful about what you eat. Possibly both.
The Lives of Birds by Graeme Gibson · Bloomsbury, £12.99
The surface of the ocean is effectively a skin — the "sea surface microlayer" — just one millimetre thick but inhabited by its own distinct ecosystem of bacteria, viruses, and microorganisms found nowhere else on Earth. It is the ocean's interface with the atmosphere, and it is where a remarkable proportion of gas exchange between sea and air takes place. We have been sailing on top of this invisible world for millennia without knowing it was there.
The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works by Helen Czerski · Torva, £10.99
For most of recorded history, left-handedness was treated as a mild form of moral failing. The Latin word for left, sinister, tells you everything you need to know about how the Romans felt about it. In medieval Europe, the left hand was associated with the Devil, and left-handed children were routinely forced to write with their right. Scotland's "Clan of the Left Hand" (Clan Kerr) acquired their reputation partly because left-handed swordfighters were disconcertingly difficult to defend against.
The Left-Hander's Handbook by Diane Paul · Robinson, £9.99
The sandwich was not invented by the Earl of Sandwich. He popularised a concept that had existed in various forms since at least the 11th century, when the rabbi Hillel the Elder is said to have placed bitter herbs between two pieces of unleavened bread at Passover. What the Earl actually contributed was social permission — if a peer of the realm could be seen eating meat between bread at a gaming table, everyone else could relax about it too.
The Sandwich: A Global History by Bee Wilson · Reaktion Books, £9.99
Octopuses have three hearts, blue blood (copper-based rather than iron-based), and neurons distributed throughout their arms — meaning each arm is capable of a degree of independent problem-solving. An octopus that loses an arm does not simply lose a limb; it loses approximately a third of its neurons. This may explain why they are so reluctant to cooperate with researchers, who they appear to regard with a weary, slightly contemptuous intelligence.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith · William Collins, £10.99
The Great Wall of China is not visible from space — this is one of the more persistent geographical myths in circulation. The wall is roughly as wide as a motorway, and you would need extraordinarily good eyesight to see a motorway from the International Space Station. Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei searched for it during his 2003 mission and couldn't find it. What you can see from orbit, rather more easily, is the Sahara Desert, which is approximately the size of the United States.
An Encyclopedia of Misconceptions by Matt Brown · Batsford, £12.99
London's Underground system contains approximately 40% more stations than currently appear on the map. Between 1900 and 1994, more than 40 stations were closed for various reasons — insufficient passengers, wartime damage, line rerouting. Some remain structurally intact beneath the city and are used for filming, cable routing, and flood-management infrastructure. At least one, Down Street, served as Winston Churchill's emergency bunker during the Blitz.
Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London by Anthony Clayton · Historical Publications, £14.99
The sound of a thunderclap is not the thunder itself — it is the sonic boom produced when superheated air around a lightning bolt (roughly five times hotter than the surface of the sun) rapidly expands and then contracts. The rumbling quality of distant thunder occurs because sound from different parts of a long lightning channel arrives at different times. A single lightning bolt can be several kilometres long, which gives you some range of arrival.
The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney · Sceptre, £10.99
The concept of "spare time" is historically very recent. For most of human history, the boundary between work, rest, religious observance, and social life was blurred to the point of invisibility. The idea that there was a category of time belonging entirely to the individual — to be used however they wished, with no productive obligation — only crystallised during industrialisation, when factory hours imposed a hard boundary that made "not-work" newly legible as a concept. Leisure, in other words, was invented by the factory clock.
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang · Penguin, £10.99